


tear out all of your tenderness

by lalejandra



Category: Bandom, Pete Wentz and His Humans
Genre: F/M, mentions of child abuse
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-17
Updated: 2021-01-17
Packaged: 2021-03-14 22:53:43
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,316
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28803126
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lalejandra/pseuds/lalejandra
Summary: What would she know about regular teenage girls anyway?
Relationships: Ashlee Simpson/Pete Wentz
Kudos: 2
Collections: Kink Bingo 2010 (Round Three)





	tear out all of your tenderness

[[Blanket permission for all transformative works. I would love to hear about it if you make a transformative work using this as source. If you want to get in touch with me for that or any other reason, please feel free: lalejandra@aleuromancy.net]]

Title: tear out all of your tenderness  
by lalejandra  
  
Summary:

What would she know about regular teenage girls anyway?

  
  
Notes:

Contains: unsafe sex, mentions of eating disorders and self-harm and domestic/child abuse

Written for kink bingo 2010. 

  
  
Published at: 2010-08-12  
Revised at: 2010-08-12 01:23:23 -0400  
  


Ashlee learned at a young fucking age to just lie back and think of anything else -- let what's gonna happen happen, and don't fight it. Fighting's worthless, it only gets Daddy yelling and Mama making excuses and Jess crying. Saying no -- yelling no, screaming no -- doesn't get anyone to look at you. It just makes everyone look away.

She doesn't say no anymore, but she doesn't say yes either, and they can't make her. They can't make her _agree_. She eats what they tell her to eat, and never asks for anything special, different, or extra. She starves when they tell her to starve, and never says that she's hungry. She dances when they tell her to dance -- on a twisted knee, on a sprained ankle, on charley horses and jammed toes and pulled muscles. They don't want her to be hurt? She won't be hurt. She won't give them her pain.

Fame was never what she aimed for; pop music was never what she loved; dancing started out as an escape and ended up a trap. She sings when they tell her to sing, and lip syncs when they tell her to lip sync, and insist they know her fans better than she does -- what would she know about regular teenage girls anyway? When she gets caught lip syncing, she doesn't even get to write on her own website or talk to the press; it's irony, right? That she doesn't get to have a voice?

Daddy doesn't want her fucking anyone, but Mama slips her condoms, and Jess tells her mournfully not to make the same mistakes that she did by waiting for marriage. Two against one, so she fucks, but it's boring, so she doesn't do it often, and when she does it, it's only with people Daddy would hate but can't really object to. It is a literal lying back and thinking of something, anything else, and she doesn't even bother to pretend to come, and people only hear what they want to hear anyway, so they always think she likes it.

She feels like Ariel, trapped by the evil octopus into giving up her voice in exchange for legs, but Ashlee didn't get legs, or love, or anything. Just a new nose that she didn't even want. But they tell her to get cut open -- _Daddy_ tells her to get cut open, tells her to have her nose broken and put into a different place, a piece of it shaved off -- and she does.

Recuperating is the best time she ever has; no one talks to her. She wonders what would happen if she cut up her own face, or cut off a few fingers, if then they'd leave her alone forever. But if they _don't_ leave her alone forever, that would be... pretty awful. She sticks with the plan she's had since childhood: one day she's going to make a lot of money, take it out of the bank in cash, and go _somewhere else._

She is pretty sure that at this point she'd have to go to Myanmar, because it's probably the only place in the world where they don't know who she is, don't watch reruns of _The Ashlee Simpson Show_ and laugh themselves sick.

When life is particularly hard, that's her fantasy. She takes her money and leaves, gets a new ID somehow, with a totally different name, something not an inside joke or pop culture reference, something she thinks she can live with the rest of her life. She wonders, sometimes, if her parents expected her to live long enough to learn to enjoy being called "Ashlee" or if they thought she'd die young.

Dying young looks like more and more like the only way out.

She can't seem to stop herself, though -- drinking and tattoos and the wrong boys who don't enhance her reputation when she's seen with them. "I'm sorry, Daddy, I thought I was doing what you'd like," is her most-repeated refrain, she thinks.

Pete is the first time she's rebelled in a really long time. Since before she gave in and had the nose job, she thinks; he's the first non-Daddy approved guy she's had sex with since then, the first non-Daddy approved guy she's with on the pages of tabloids, listed among that skank Michelle, and poor Lindsay. And when Daddy tells her to have a public fight and break up with him, Ashlee _doesn't_. She can't bring herself to do it -- because she never says no to Pete either, but he seems to figure that out somehow, to know that something's going on. He calls her "Ash" or "Ashers," and sometimes by other names, almost never "Ashlee," like he knows she hates it and cringes when anyone calls her that.

He drops the other girls without her having to ask. He doesn't make her go out all the time; sometimes they stay in and watch musicals, and he rubs her feet, and kisses her nose, and doesn't even try to kiss her or fuck her. When he's on, he's really on, and he sends her flowers for every occasion and sometimes even for just "thinking of you, miss your teeth." It makes her wonder if he saw _The Ashlee Simpson Show_ and thought one single moment of it wasn't scripted to death.

Maybe he just likes her and wants her to have orange flowers "to brighten your day without me," just like the card says.

When he's off, he's really off -- and every time he feels ( _more_ , she knows) self-destructive (than usual), he does something awful, like he thinks cheating on her or ignoring her or -- or _anything_ \-- could chase her away now.

Or maybe he's trying to give her space to leave her options open.

Christmas Eve, after the house is quiet, he sneaks into her bedroom -- no boys allowed, even though she's twenty-three and hasn't been a virgin since sixteen -- and they curl up together on her bed. Pete smells like Mama's spiced ham and tastes like he's been sneaking bites of pie from the fridge. He's the big spoon, even though she's never asked him to be. He said no to Daddy tonight, yelled at him, banged the table, wore eyeliner even though he knows Daddy hates it, and shouted him down. Then he asked Mama to pass the beans like it was nothing, like he and Daddy could ever be anything but enemies after that -- but they watched television together hours later, and Pete laughed and joked with Daddy.

She huffs out a breath and squeezes her eyes shut tightly.

"Say the word," Pete murmurs into her hair. "I'll take you away from this. From him."

She doesn't move, pretends to be sleeping, and he lets her. But the next day she goes off her birth control pills, tells Pete she's decided to stop taking them, and when they have sex (in her bed, in her childhood bed, which she's never done with anyone else), he doesn't reach for the condoms they both always have around.

Afterward, she wants to be the big spoon, and he lets her without saying something stupid, or asking any awful questions. She stares at his flat-ironed hair, coarse and dyed dark, his creamy skin, the bumps of his spine, and tightens her arm around his chest.

"Yes," she whispers.

  



End file.
